Editorials

The part of US history we don’t talk about

21 February 2017

By Lauren E. White

The history of the United States of America is widely studied both in the US and in Britain. To be fair, we probably learn more about the US’s history than our own, despite the government’s attempts to quash this by stopping all American literature being studied at GCSE level.

But in our extensive cover of US history, there is one part of it that we don’t discuss. And that’s because it doesn’t fit with what the US prides itself on.

In fact, this part of history is so ugly that not even the US teaches it to their students.

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This part of history is the Japanese internment camps authorised by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the only commander-in-chief to serve four terms in the highest office. It was 75 years ago on Sunday (19th February 1942) when FDR signed executive order 9066 which put 110,000 Japanese Americans into concentration camps.

To give you some context as to why FDR  – America’s greatest ever president (look at what else he did and he scores pretty close to Obama) – signed such a disgusting and brutal order, we turn to look at Pearl Harbor. On 7th December 1941, Japan bombed America, killing 2,403 people, 68 of whom were innocent civilians.

Pearl Harbor prompted the US to enter the Second World War, although they did already have involvement, despite what Roosevelt said. They’d been allowing Britain to have arms for free as we couldn’t afford to buy them anymore. Although it was illegal for a man to leave the US and fight under the Neutrality Act, Roosevelt said he would understand if a man did leave America and join the fight against a fascist regime led by Adolf Hitler.

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Before Pearl Harbor, though, Japanese people in the US had a hard time. They faced vulgar racism mostly resulting from the fact that they were so different from Americans in religion and culture. Most of them were Buddhist rather than Christian and a few of them had amassed quite a bit of wealth in the US. During the time of the Great Depression, you can imagine what kind of effect that had: foreigners making more money than actual natives of the US. (That could take us to another story, but we’ll talk about it another time…)

The treatment of the victims was appalling too. Families were given their own room; all adults were forced to mostly build war supplies for shocking pay. The internment camps of America were liberated in 1946 after prisoners were asked to renounce their loyalty to the Japanese emperor and be prepared to serve in the US army.

Internment camps conjured up by the USA shouldn’t be forgotten, if they were even taught to be remembered in the first place. No country has a perfect record and it’s not wrong to admit it. What is wrong is forgetting and rewriting history. That’s when it gets dangerous.

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